Google rolls out its AI ‘Flight Deals’ tool globally, adds new travel features in Search (techcrunch.com)

Google announced a global expansion of several AI-powered travel features in Search. Its Flight Deals tool, which launched in August for the U.S., Canada and India, is now available in 200+ countries and territories and supports 60+ languages; users describe where, when and how they want to travel and the model surfaces the best bargain destinations in Google Flights. The company also added travel planning to its Canvas side panel in AI Mode: after specifying trip preferences, Canvas builds a multi-session plan that fuses real-time Search results, Maps data (photos, reviews, locations) and web content to present flight/hotel comparisons, restaurant and activity suggestions and allow iterative follow-ups. Separately, Google is rolling agentic booking features—previously limited to Labs testers—out to all U.S. users so the assistant can search across reservation platforms for real‑time availability and surface curated options; direct booking for flights and hotels in AI Mode is promised later. For the AI/ML community this underscores a shift toward agentic, grounded assistants that combine real‑time retrieval, multi‑turn state and cross‑platform action orchestration. Key technical implications include scalable multilingual retrieval, reliable grounding of model outputs to dynamic data sources, privacy and consent considerations when automating bookings, and the engineering needed to safely execute transactions. The rollout is a live testbed for integrating retrieval-augmented generation, multimodal context (Maps + Search), and agent workflows at global scale—challenges that many practitioners and product teams will now need to address.